7 Steps To Getting Paid More And Promoted Faster

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BY FC Expert Blogger Brian Tracy | 03-06-2012 | 11:00 AM

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

There are methods and techniques used by the highest-paid and most successful people in our society to get paid more money for what they do and get promoted faster to higher levels of authority and responsibility.

When you begin to use them yourself, you put your entire life and career onto the fast track. You will make more progress in the next couple of years than the average person makes in 10 or 20 years.

Here are 7 ways to get started:

1. Find a High-Growth Industry
You can make more progress toward getting paid more and getting promoted faster in a couple of years in a high-growth industry than you might in five or 10 years in a slow-growth industry.
Once you have identified a high-growth industry, do your homework. Research and find out what companies in that industry are growing the most rapidly. Remember, 20 percent of the companies in any industry make 80 percent of the profits. They have better leadership, better products and services, better technology, and a better future. These are the companies where you want to work.

2. Select the Right Boss
Choosing the right boss is one of the most important decisions that you ever make. It can accelerate your career and enable you get paid more and promoted faster than almost anything else you do.
You should look upon accepting a job as if you were entering into a marriage, with your boss as your spouse. He or she is going to have an enormous impact on how much you get paid, how much you enjoy your work, how rapidly you get promoted, and every other part of your work life.
When you are looking for a job, you should interview your potential boss carefully to make sure that he or she is the kind of person you would enjoy working with and for. This should be someone whom you would respect and look up to, someone who is friendly and supportive and on whom you can depend to help you move ahead as rapidly as possible. Whenever possible, you should talk to other people who work for that boss.

3. Develop a Positive Attitude
Fully 85 percent of your success in work, no matter how intelligent or skilled you are, is going to be determined by your attitude and your personality. Your overall success, how much you are paid, and how fast you are promoted will be largely determined by how much people like you and want to help you.

Research shows that a positive, cheerful person is more likely to be paid more and promoted faster. This kind of person is more readily noticed by superiors who can accelerate his or her career. In addition, a positive person is supported by his or her coworkers and staff. There seems to be an upward pressure from his or her peers that drives a positive person forward at a faster rate.
The critical determinant of a positive attitude is how well you function under stress. Anyone can be positive when things are going well. But it is when you face difficulties and setbacks that you demonstrate to yourself and to everyone else what you are really made of. You’ve heard it said that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” A person with a positive attitude looks for the good in every person and every situation. He or she looks for something positive or humorous. The positive person tends to be constructive rather than destructive. And the good news is that a positive attitude is something that you can learn by practicing it, every single day, especially when it is most needed.

4. Create a Positive Image
It is absolutely amazing how many people are held back, year after year, because no one has ever taken them aside and told them how important their external appearance is to getting paid what they are truly worth.

The first rule is that you should always dress for success in your job and in your company. Look at the top people in your industry. Look at the top people in your company. Look at the pictures in newspapers and magazines of the men and women who are being promoted to positions of higher responsibility and pay. Pattern yourself after the leaders, not the followers.

5. Start Earlier, Work Harder, and Stay Later
Develop a workaholic mentality. There is nothing that will bring you to the attention of the important people in your work life faster than for you to get a reputation as a hard, hard worker.
Everybody knows who the hard workers are in every business. The hardest workers are always the most respected in any company of value. They are always paid more and promoted faster for a very simple reason: They are more productive. They get more work done in a shorter period of time. They are more valuable to the company. They set a better example, and are the kind of people bosses are proud of and want to keep more than anyone else.

The rule is that two extra hours of work each day are all you really need to invest to become one of the most successful people of your generation. You can get these extra two hours by coming in an hour earlier and staying an hour later. In most cases, this will expand your day slightly but it will expand your career tremendously.

The top people in every field work more hours than the average people. In fact, the top 10 percent of money-earners in the United States work 50 to 60 hours per week. In addition, remember that they work all the time they work. They do not waste time. When they arrive at work early, they immediately start in on important tasks.

This must be your goal as well. Work all the time you work. Do not play on the computer all day, make personal phone calls, read the newspaper, or chat about the latest football game or television program. The average person today works at less than 50 percent of capacity. Only about 5 percent of people in the world of work today actually work the whole time. Everyone else is functioning somewhere below their potential, in many cases far, far below.

6. Push to the Front
One of the most important ways to come out ahead is for you to continually ask for more responsibility. Volunteer for every assignment. Go to your boss at least once every week and ask him or her for more responsibility.

Most people in the world of work do only what is asked of them. But this is not for you. Your job is to keep asking for more, and, whenever you are given a new responsibility, to fulfill it quickly and well. Remember: You want to develop a reputation for being the kind of person who is given the responsibility whenever someone wants to get something done quickly.

Do you want a promotion? Getting one is very much under your control. The fact is that you promote yourself every time you take on a new responsibility. You will eventually rise to the level of the responsibility you are willing to accept. There are no limits. And there are fewer things more important in helping you get paid what you’re really worth than for you to develop a reputation for speed and dependability. Be the kind of person your boss can count on to get the job done fast. Whatever it takes, treat every assignment you receive as if it were a test upon which your future career depended.

A young man in a large company told me this story: One year he volunteered to head up the United Way campaign in his company. All of the other managers had avoided this responsibility because it was so time-consuming.

But the young man saw it as an opportunity to perform for senior people in the company. He leaped at the responsibility, and did an outstanding job of getting everyone in the company to contribute to making the campaign a success. In the course of running the campaign, the young man was able to meet with almost every senior manager in the company, getting a chance to talk to them and become known by them.

As a result of the success of the campaign, the president of the company was given a special award and was written up in the newspapers as one of the top executives in the community. Within six months after the campaign ended, this young man had been promoted twice. A year later, his former manager, who had avoided the United Way responsibility, was working for my friend.

7. Ask for What You Want
This is one of the most important success principles you will ever learn to help put your career onto the fast track: The future belongs to the askers. The future does not belong to those people who sit back, wishing and hoping that their lives and their work will become better. The future belongs to those people who step up and ask for what they want. If they don’t get it, they ask again and again until they do.

Ask your boss what you have to do to qualify for an increase. There is no point in your working hard if you don’t know exactly what it is that you have to do to get paid more and promoted faster. Clarity is essential. Go to your boss and ask, and ask again if you are still not clear.

If you want an increase, you must ask for it. And the way you ask is by building a case, as a lawyer would build a case, for your getting the amount that you want to receive. Instead of saying that you need more money, as most people do, you have a different strategy. You put together a list of the jobs that you are now doing and the additional experience and skills you have developed. Show the financial impact of your work on the overall operations of the company and the contribution that you are making as a top employee.

Present this information to your boss, in writing, and tell him or her that, based on all of this, you would like an increase of a specific amount of money per month and per year. In many cases, you will get the increase simply by asking for it in an intelligent way. In some cases you will get less than you requested. If this happens, ask what you will have to do to get the rest of the increase that you asked for.

If your request for an increase is turned down, ask exactly what you will have to do to get the increase you requested at a later time and exactly when that increase will be payable. Be specific. Be clear.

And don’t be afraid to ask.

--This article is adapted from Brian Tracy's Earn What You're Really Worth, Copyright 2012; reprinted with permission from Vanguard Press.

What Glass Ceiling? Killer Career Advice From Women Who Lead By Example

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BY Lydia Dishman | 03-05-2012 | 10:20 AM

It's been more than 100 years since 15,000 women marched through the streets of New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay, and voting rights, but how much progress have women really made in the workforce?

First, the tough news: Although women make up 49% of the total workforce, they represent 59% of low-wage workers. That number is down from 63% a decade ago, but research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) shows that it will take until 2056 for women and men’s earnings to reach pay parity--if the wage gap continues to close at the same pace it has for the last 50 years.

Another sobering statistic is from a study by Grant Thornton International on the status of women in leadership roles at top private companies worldwide. In 2011, only 20% of those at the helm were women--down from 24% the year before. The world's largest economies--the G7 nations, which include the United States--lag further, with an average of 16% women leaders. In the U.S., only 3.6 percent of of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. And the recession may have brought the glass ceiling down a bit further as companies attempting to reverse the “mancession” hired more men.

Instead of bemoaning the numbers, though, Kathy Cloninger, former CEO of Girl Scouts of the U.S., is calling on all women to raise awareness and push back. As such, Girl Scouts is spearheading a nonprofit-sector celebration of 2012 as the Year of the Girl. “But what we really need is a Decade of the Girl, because we need to take a giant step, and we need more than a year to do it,” declared
Cloninger in her book Tough Cookies: Leadership Lessons from 100 Years of the Girl Scouts.
 

To do this, Girl Scout's current CEO Ana Maria Chavez advocates leading by example. "Girl Scouts was founded 100 years ago. We need to update the organization and our model, or else we're going to lose people." From using mobile payment technology to boost sales of those cookies (which totaled $700 million last year) to holding virtual troop meetings via web-conferencing, the organization is furthering its mission to train young girls to be entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders.

Here's a look at what other female leaders had to say about breaking down barriers and achieving success, whether you're clicking into a conference room in Louboutins or pounding the pavement in your Danskos.

Don't Take Your Foot Off The Gas

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, gave a now-famous TED talk on why we have too few women leaders. As a mother of two, she is sympathetic to women feeling like they have to choose between career and family, so she offers this: "Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child--and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making."

Know Yourself

Ellen Kumata of Cambria Consulting says, “Women tend to think more broadly about business issues on both the business and the people sides, including the long term. But they are not thinking broadly about themselves. They do not see their own potential; they do not fully comprehend the politics.”

Women who get into and are successful in the C-suite realize that it is perfectly okay to work the high-end corporate politics in order to pull the top team together in ways that advance them to the benefit of the organization.

Go Where the Opportunities Are

Alice Korngold, founder of Korngold Consulting, points out that on nonprofit boards, the person who raises her hand and offers to spearhead an initiative often gets to do it. “There are an abundance of boards with no glass ceilings," she says. "Consequently, nonprofit boards provide extraordinary opportunities for women to engage at the highest levels of leadership--including as board chairs, vice chairs, secretaries of the board, treasurers, and committee chairs.”

Channel Emotion

Cofounder and president of thatgamecompany Kellee Santiago has proven that her David-sized business is more than worthy of taking on the lumbering corporate gaming Goliaths. Her games Flower and flOw both achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with nary a weapon or zombie corpse warlord in sight. Flower is all about flow--the concept, not the game--which is based on a psychological theory of engagement that's gaining traction in design circles. "When I was at the USC School of Cinematic Arts media program, we were taught a process that focuses on starting with the emotion, as opposed to the mechanics," says Santiago.

Don't Be Afraid To Scrap

Linda Chavez-Thompson, former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, was called many names in her 30-year tenure in the labor movement--and "pushy broad" was one of the nicer ones. “I wear it like a badge of honor. Back in Texas I'd be in meetings where I'd cuss like a sailor. I didn't have a choice: How much you could take and dish out was the measure of others' respect for you. Remember, I was dealing with six-foot-tall, 250-pound Texans who smoked big cigars. I couldn't let them push me around. While a few of my union brothers didn't like me, they sure did respect me."

Take Charge of Office Politics

Kimberly Davis, president of JPMorgan Chase Foundation, finds that niche cultures within the overall corporate culture can be pockets of innovation, if you play your cards right, in this 30 Second MBA video.

Get in the Trenches

Pat Button doesn't ask anyone on her team to do anything she wouldn't do herself. The chief nursing officer of Zynx Health admits she’s very self-motivated but she also enjoys working as part of a team and tends to hire people who have expertise she lacks. "I have very high standards from how the content is developed to how the muffins are baked. What people have said about me very consistently is that I have high expectations, but they are reasonable and they are clear. For me, it is important for people to know where they stand but to do that in a thoughtful way."

Take Care of Your People

Eve Blossom started Lulan Artisans as a for-profit, social venture to helps artisans sell their expertise, textiles, and other goods. Not only does the company teach their artisan partners how negotiate fair trade prices for their work and how to stay successful in business long-term, Lulan also implements tailored benefits programs for each community where it partners with artisans. Whether artisans need education in their communities or eye care, Lulan finds a way to help.

Just Say No

There is one little word that packs a big punch, but many women have a hard time deploying: No. Yet entrepreneur and CEO Margaret Heffernen says almost any communication--however negative--is preferable to silence. “However unpleasant the information or feedback may be, it allows others to make informed decisions in their own time. Silence, by contrast, leaves them stuck, unsure when or whether to move, unclear whether action is needed or not. What I learned from my television days is that when you tell people the truth, in a timely fashion, you show them respect. And that's how you earn it too.”

Separate Public and Private Life

In an age of chronic oversharing on social media, it's hard to know where to draw the line. Amber Mac admits it's still hard to refuse a "friend" invite that makes its way to her personal Facebook account.

She strikes a balance by never sharing any photos on that page she wouldn't be comfortable showing publicly. “I also refuse to broadcast my phone number or address with anyone, and I more or less just assume that privacy settings won't help me that much if someone in my network decides to breach my trust.”

Take Risks

Kim Jordan, cofounder, CEO and president of New Belgium Brewing Company, offers this bit of advice on when to take the lead and when to let someone else bear the risk.

Most Popular Productivity Method: The Pomodoro Technique

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When it's time to stop talking—or reading—about productivity and get some work done, you have plenty of options to choose from if you're looking for a system that will help you make the best use of your time and energy. Last week we asked you which productivity techniques you turned to when you wanted to get down to business, and then we took a look at the top five, based on your nominations. Now we're back to crown the overall winner.

Voting was tight all weekend, mostly for the top three spots, but the Pomodoro Technique came out on top with 37% of the votes cast, with Getting Things Done (GTD) right behind it in second place with 28%. In third place was a hybrid or custom productivity technique, one that you said combined elements of the others or that you had built to suit your workflow. In fourth place was Seinfeld's Productivity Secret, also known as "Don't Break the Chain," with 11% of the vote, and bringing up the rear was The Action Method, with just under 2% of the overall vote.

Landing Page Optimization for More Profitable Experiences

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by Chris Goward

Designing for findability, usability, and brand reinforcement are basic requirements of web experience design. But the purpose of a website is not just to be found and admired. It's to generate leads, sales, and revenue.

By using a conversion rate optimization process that tests UX and persuasion hypotheses, you can create pages that are proven to generate more revenue. Results like that get positive attention from upper management and the C-suite.

Let’s look at an example of how this works.

Conversion Rate Optimization for PlanetAmex.com

When PlanetAmex.com, an exclusive business-class travel booking service, needed to improve their sales from their paid search landing pages, they knew the standard experience redesign process wouldn’t be enough. They needed to be sure that a new landing page design would deliver more sales, not just look better or have a pleasant user experience.

The home page of PlanetAmex.com receives thousands of visitors per month and 91% of them are new. The site attracts a high quality audience: people in the top 2% of households who are looking for first class and business class flights.

A high bounce rate on their old landing page was hurting sales

Their visitors weren’t spending enough time on the site to make a favorable impression, let alone an immediate purchase. Even though their traffic was high quality, their bounce rate was very high.
Something about the landing page experience was repelling many of the visitors and their opportunity to sell to these potential customers evaporated with every bounce.



What would they need to do to persuade a greater percentage of people to stay, click, and get a quote or call to book right away?

Ask any dozen UX professionals, web designers, or marketers what should be improved on this page, and you’ll get a dozen (or more) opinions. But the business owners couldn’t take the risk of just putting up a new page based on opinions. They needed to know for sure that they would get better results with their new page.

The Solution: Conversion Optimization

The only way to know for sure is to run statistically valid tests of new user experiences, design, and copywriting variations. By running controlled A/B split tests on the live site, company management can get real data from live visitors and know with certainty which page variation would maximize sales.

The most simplified version of the conversion optimization process shows three steps:

Step 1 – Analyze

There are a number of frameworks you could use to guide you in analyzing a landing page experience. WiderFunnel provides a popular framework for conversion rate optimization called the LIFT Model™ (which stands for “Landing page Influence Function for Tests”), shown below.



You can use this as a guide for analyzing page experiences from the perspective of the visitor.

Step 2 – Hypothesize

The UX and persuasion problems you’ll identify using a framework like the LIFT Model can be flipped into hypotheses, which can then be tested.

For example, if you believe there’s a clarity problem with the copywriting hiding the main benefits of the service within blocks of copy, a hypothesis could say: "Adding clear benefits in bullet point format will increase the booking conversion rate." A hypothesis like this is something you can go and test in a controlled experiment, which leads us to step 3.

Step 3 – Test

When the PlanetAmex.com management asked us to improve their landing page conversion rate, I knew we needed to test dramatically different page variations. We did just that by designing several new pages that we tested alongside the original “control” page.
In just a few days, we discovered that one of the pages lifted conversions through their most valuable channel, phone calls, by 48%!

Here’s the winning page design:



You can use a conversion optimization on all of your website projects to ensure the changes you recommend lead to real business results. You will look like a hero and, importantly, your boss, client or project sponsor will too!

Online Retailers, Listen Up: Tips for Delighting Shoppers

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By David Brussin
E-Commerce Times
03/02/12 5:00 AM PT 

With plenty of options for customizing website content, it can be difficult to pinpoint which exact tactics will significantly move the needle on your conversion rates. However, the key to implementing a successful online marketing strategy is to always test new ideas, iterate your messages and promotions, and optimize the tactics and campaigns that are proven to drive the best results.

The Internet has become the world's largest shopping mall, and the market is continuing to grow. Q4 2011 U.S. retail ecommerce sales were up 14 percent compared with 2010, reaching nearly US$50 billion for the quarter, ComScore recently reported.

Total U.S. e-commerce sales are projected to reach $279 billion by 2014, according to a Forrester forecast.

Moreover, the tablet has emerged as a lucrative shopping device for brands due to its large, sleek screen and easy-to-use functionality. In fact, the average order value (AOV) for shoppers on tablets was $123 per purchase in 2011.

Yet despite this increase in growth and opportunity, many brands continue to overlook simple steps they can take to maximize sales and enhance the online shopping experience.

Here are some tips to improve the performance of your website and increase revenue along the way.

Consistency Is Key

Your website is the first introduction many shoppers will have to your brand, so it needs to immediately convey your story and value proposition. It is also important to maintain consistent messaging and branding regardless of the marketing channel that drives users to your site.
The era of the "one-size-fits-all" website is over, which means everywhere you have an online presence is an opportunity to deliver a unique experience to the shopper. Make sure you echo messages and promotions on the landing page and throughout the user session, whether shoppers are driven to your website from social sites Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest; email campaigns; paid search; or other marketing channels like affiliate or direct. It is essential to provide customers with a shopping experience that is consistent with how they find you.

Stay on Target

Targeted website messages are one of the most effective ways for e-commerce brands to increase relevancy and improve the online shopping experience for the consumer. In order to boost key business metrics like conversions and average order values, you should tailor website messages to defined segments of customers based on whether they've shopped with you before, their physical location, previous browsing behavior and more.

Shoppers can tell you a lot by what they browse for online. By tracking anonymous consumer behavior, brands can dynamically display content and offers tailored to an individual's browsing habits within the current shopping session. The key is to look at what shoppers search for -- not just what they buy.

For example, you might display the latest Merrell hiking boots to consumers who have previously searched for hiking gear. Retailers who target promotions based on brand preferences routinely see double digit increases in average order value.

Here are some simple ways to better target website messaging and promotions based on knowledge about the customer:

International: When international consumers visit your site from overseas, make sure they know you are open and ready for business wherever they are. Deliver banners or messages on your site that inform them of where you ship, of any flat-rate shipping offers, and whether they can shop in their native currency.

Highlight Tax Free Sales: When shoppers visit from a sales-tax-free state, tell them. Although you are announcing a benefit that already exists, research shows that sales tax announcements can significantly increase average order value.

Geographic Targeting: Consumers like to shop locally, and you can get an advantage by using the location of a website visitor. A sports retailer, for example, may want to highlight New York Yankees merchandise if a shopper from Manhattan visits their online store. Additionally, national brands can achieve significant revenue boosts by welcoming shoppers from San Francisco with a banner that says "San Francisco's best source" of whatever that store sells.

Weather: "How's the weather?" may seem like a superficial conversation starter, but when it comes to online shopping, weather-based targeting is a boon to e-commerce. For example, if a consumer in rainy Seattle visits Gap's website, Gap could offer the shopper a special promotion on raincoats; whereas, someone in Miami who goes to the website may see a message about swimsuits. Same website -- different consumer experience.

Calling Attention to Specific Items Increases Conversion

Think about the shopping experience from your customers' perspective: Rows and rows of products begin to look the same after a while. Sometimes online shoppers need a little push to make a purchase.

Drawing attention to popular brands is a proven way to pique an online shopper's interest -- and encourage sales. And the result of pointing these items out, known as "badging," can be a significant increase in order value, conversion rate and revenue per session.

Most likely you are familiar with badging even if you never heard the word. If you've visited an online store where some products are highlighted by small messages that appear on the product image, then you've seen badging at work.

Badging can include tags like "Great for Fall," "Best-Seller," or "Top-Rated." This strategy relies on basic psychology to draw attention to individual items within a group. And it works.

Fixing Shopping Cart Woes

Online retailers have been grappling with shopping cart abandonment for as long as online shopping carts have been around. Yet, abandonment rates have been hovering around 60 percent for many years. That means for every 1,000 customers who put something in their shopping cart, 600 will leave your website without buying anything -- this translates to a lot of lost revenue.

By keeping track of which customers add items to their cart and then leave the website, you can store information about those cart items so when shoppers return they can be greeted with a reminder of their items. A little encouraging message can even be added that reminds shoppers to make their purchase "before these items sell out."

Testing Makes Perfect

With plenty of options for customizing website content, it can be difficult to pinpoint which exact tactics will significantly move the needle on your conversion rates. However, the key to implementing an online marketing strategy that works for your specific business is to always test new ideas, iterate your messages and promotions, and optimize the tactics and campaigns that are proven to drive the best results.

While the above tips may represent different levels of relevance to your brand, all of them should spark bright ideas about how to add and retain more customers, increase relevancy, and improve the shopping experience for your customers.